I posted (funny how I can't bring myself to type "blogged", I've been "posting" messages for nearly two decades now and a blog is just a bulletin board system with a potentially much larger audience.) a while back about a new gadget I'd gotten. The Danger Sidekick. In case you don't remember its a cool little cellphone/email messenger/web browser/AIM/pager/camera/pda convergence device. I got one about a week after they came out and loved having those functions all rolled into one device.

I set aside the little nagging doubt about having one device that performed so many functions. Keep a cellphone separate from your PDA from your camera from your pager. That way if any one device fails (dead batteries mostly), you're not SOL with the others. But, the Sidekick was cheap enough and T-Mobile offered the device so I threw caution to the wind and bought one.

I must admit that I really enjoyed the device and its form factor. The applications worked well for what they were supposed to do. The fact that it was Internet connected through GPRS all the time and synchronized the PIM functionality with the web servers at Danger made it much cooler. I could make an entry on the device or on the web and the two would immediately synchronize. I'm also a firm believer in having multiple copies of important data lying around on various machines and data stores. The Sidekick could be destroyed but all my data was safe. I could take the SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) card from the phone that had been destroyed, place it in another Sidekick and all my data would synchronize to the new device. Very cool.

But after three months I came to realize that I really didn't need a cellphone that was somewhat uncomfortable to use. That had miserable battery life. And that the build quality was exactly what you'd expect of a startup that did not have long experience in building devices to be used under harsh mobile conditions. The absolute worst infraction was that the Sidekick's firmware is absolutely bug ridden!

I don't mean just minor bugs either. A cellphone should ring when you call it, or at least somehow notify its owner of an incoming call. And if for some reason it doesn't ring, it should notify its owner that there is a message waiting. And be persistent about both. When the SK went into keylock mode (whether it did so itself or through user input) it would intermittently turn off the ring and alert tones! What good is a cellphone that doesn't alert you that someone is trying to get in touch with you? Not good at all.

I realize that I've also posted regarding the desire to "get away" from some of the more intrusive communications technologies that are available today. And I understand that cellphones are one of those technologies. However, I carry a cellphone because I have committments. My first committment is to Heather, and when she tried to contact me because she left her keys in my vehicle one evening and the Sidekick didn't ring... well, it was time to chew some support droid butt.

I called T-Mobile. They wound up giving me a month of free service because they know there's an issue with the device that they can't yet solve. So, being the good American consumer I am I voted with my wallet.

Last Friday I bought a new Nokia 6310i on the AT&T GSM network. I got this particular model for two reasons. First, Nokia is known for building hardware that can withstand the rigors of time. We use Nokia's at work, and some of my team's phones are going on four and five years old. The 6310i also has Bluetooth built-in.

Bluetooth is a short range wireless network protocol that allows several devices to create a "personal area network" without all the wires hanging all over the place. Now this is a little portion of Nirvanna on which I've been waiting for a good long time.

I also recently purchased a Palm Tungsten T PDA as a replacement for my aging iPaq PocketPC. The Tungsten has Bluetooth built-in as well.

I had pondered the implications of Bluetooth connectivity since hearing about it almost seven years ago now. But until the point where I had my PDA, my cellphone, and my laptop all on Bluetooth I never realized the power that such a situation could create.

I synchronize the Palm with the Apple Powerbook over BT without any cables, and the devices don't have to be "line-of-sight" to each other. I can use the Palm to dial or send SMS without having to take the phone off of my belt, or even out of the bag it is in across the room. Either the Powerbook or the Palm can use the phone as a GPRS modem to access the Internet as long as the phone is within a 10 meter radius of the devices. Very friggin cool!

I can surf the Net from the Palm and people think I'm making calendar entries or something! Heh! How's that for fooling the teacher?

So between the Palm and the Nokia I now have a replacement for all the functions my Sidekick did except for AIM and digital camera functionality. I used AIM only when away on trips, and not that often. And the digital camera function was cool for the first 20 pictures. It's not like I don't carry a much higher resolution digital camera in my laptop bag anyway and the Powerbook goes everywhere with me.

One last thing in my little geek-scheme. Bluetooth also has a profile for headsets. And as you might expect there are BT headsets that sit on your ear and wirelessly integrate into your PAN. I'll get one soon and may post a picture of my "borgification". But think about it. I won't need to pull the phone out to make a call. Dial it from the address book on the Palm, when the call connects, the Nokia shoves the voice to the earset. Very, Very, Very friggin cool and integrated.

And even though all these devices are integrated to an extreme unthinkable even a year ago, it doesn't break my cardinal rule of more than one function per device. I can survive without any single device. I don't want to, but losing one doesn't diable all of my communications capabilities any longer.

Tags: Technology, Leisure, Gadgets, Mobile Internet, Cellphone

We are at the "rental" ("home" is now officially The Nest since we have the keys, and the place we live until we move into "home" is offically the "rental") Saturday evening after a long day doing homeowner type stuff at The Nest. I get out of the shower to find Heather watching Looney Tunes. She hands me the TiVo remote and tells me I can flip, after a couple of minutes of searching the program guide I drop the remote onto the couch and tell her that I know the second reason she's watching this program, there's nothing else on. The first being that she loves Looney Tunes anyway. (Don't believe me? She's sitting on the couch quoting lines as the characters are speaking them... almost... every... line!)

Anyway, I'm watching Bugs Bunny travel to a new location under ground and I have an epiphany.

Bugs Bunny travels underground because he is a rabbit, and rabbits burrow under ground.

DUH!

I'm 34 years old and have watched Looney Tunes for nearly 3.5 decades, and I just this weekend got it that Bugs Bunny travels underground when he takes long trips because rabbits burrow underground. I understood the relationship of E-mc^2 somewhere between the ages of 11 and 14. But not until now did I understand the relationship of Bugs' burrowing and him being a rabbit.

Amazing what connections get made in people's brains. I always took for granted that Bugs' mode of travel was simply the way he got around, and that it was intended to be humorous. Now it makes sense, and is still humorous.

I guess that's always why he misses that turn at Albuquerque!

Tags: Things...

I was born in California. I don't remember any of California, my folks moved to Texas for a short time. Then back to California to have my sister, then back to Texas before either of us could develop memories of the west coast.

The first memory I have is of a wood-frame house in Waco. I remember standing at an exterior door, looking through the screen door watching it rain, thunder, and lightning outside. I also remember a bit of the awe that I felt at how big the outside world seemed to be.

Sometime later we moved to a different house after my mother divorced. This house was across the street from three little-league baseball fields. There was also what seemed to be a large area of wooded ground in which me, my sister, and my friends would play. I remember the distances involved as significant. I had a conversation with my sister recently that involved our travels as pre-teens, that our "stomping grounds" were bounded by certain roads... and that there seemed to be enough adventure for an entire lifetime in that area in which we wandered.

A few years ago, the owner of the "McGregor Road House" passed away and the estate sold the land on which the house sat. The houses, being wood-frame pier-and-beam construction, were picked up and moved elsewhere leaving the land open. Heather and I stopped to take a look after grass had reclaimed the ground where the houses sat. I have a very strong sense of spatial relationships, how things physically fit together, building mental maps based on observation, and generally being able to estimate distances and recall the "lay of the land" easily. In removing the houses, the contractor had left the trees intact which left me points of reference as to where the houses had been placed. Not to mention the fact that the ball fields still exist, providing even more visual references.

As I stood in the place where the front porch of the McGregor Road house used to exist I had one of those twists of perspective that I think we all encounter as we age. I realized just exactly how small this "place" seemed to be. Heather says its because I'm "larger" now than I was then, so naturally the place would seem smaller. I don't think that's it. Not entirely. There is, was, an unexplainable difference. The place was still as intimately familiar as any place in which I had lived for a great length of time... and I realize that time changes all things. But can time really make a place smaller?

One of the other reasons I stopped there is the memory of the "Eternal Ant Hill". The EAH was a large hill of those huge red ants that everyone here in the south seems to remember from their childhoods. This was an unusually large ant hill that never fell to me and my sister's machinations. We did pretty much everything we could think of to destroy this hill, hence the name. Water out of the garden hose over hours on end couldn't flood the thing out. Gasoline poured on, and lit couldn't flame the thing out. The EAH was as indestructible as something could be to our minds back then. After nearly 18 years away, I became curious to see if it still existed. It doesn't. I know I stood on the spot where it used to be, my spatial memory of this place has not diminished any, and the rest of the references were there. But the Eternal Ant Hill was gone.

One of the things that intrigues me, due to the strong spatial sense I am sure, is maps and navigation. I own four GPS receivers, numerous mapping programs, and can quickly find my place on a paper map from visual reference cues. Last nite while looking at street level detail maps of the Waco area I decided I'd zoom in on Woodway, and specifically the area that my sister and I had agreed were our self-imposed boundaries of wandering. Using the toolset in the mapping program I quickly realized that what we considered such a huge kingdom, what provided us hours of exploration and fun amounted to nothing more than a few square miles at most of land on which we roamed. From one corner to another was not even a mile-and-a-half wide. I was floored.

We all have the experience that physical things get smaller when they are physically further away. Do we all have the experience that places get smaller in our memory the further away we get from them in time? Granted, I know "more of the world" now than at any past time in my life. And I know those distances haven't changed in the intervening years, what has? I can only guess that my distance in time from that place has caused the same effect others might experience as when observing an object from a large physical distance.

Time and distance are interchangeable. I'm surprised to find out exactly how much at times!

Tags: Leisure, Things...